Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir

1 “Where Their Best Interest Lies”: Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

c h a p t e r o n e “Where Their Best Interest Lies” Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon I Over the last ten or fifteen years I have reread Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon at least once, sometimes twice, a year and accompanied each rereading with a viewing of John Huston’s film version. Some readers may dismiss this annual rereading of the same book as either boring or silly, or merely obsessive -compulsive. I hope to find on examination that it’s neither boring nor silly, and though I may accept “obsessive-compulsive,” I reject the “merely.” I can account in part for my returning again and again to The Maltese Falcon on the practical grounds that I was using the book to work on a long narrative poem, begun in 1981 and finished in 1997, called Just Let Me Say This About That. It was written in blank verse, and given its subject matter, I wanted its diction to be as colloquial and American, as hard-nosed, energetic, and unsentimental , as I could make it. So I reread The Maltese Falcon periodically to remind myself of the kind of idiomatic, knowing, skeptical sound I wanted the poem to have, and I found that whenever I’d been working on the blank verse for a long time and the cadences and diction of Wordsworth’s Prelude or Marlowe’s dramas had begun to creep in, reading Hammett’s prose washed 2 Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them them away quick. So there is part of the reason for my going back continually to the book, but only the smaller part. The bigger one’s not so quickly nor so easily described. Let me start that description by saying that for me The Maltese Falcon is the emotional and intellectual equivalent of comfort food, that particular dish each one of us has that’s familiar, always appetizing, and that serves to console or reassure us when we’re low or sick or suffer some reversal. It’s a work so intelligent, with dialogue so witty and a view of life so worldly-wise, presented with such formal economy and flawless pacing and yet such fun to read, that it continually renews my belief in the principle that art and brains can transform just about anything, no matter how lowly or unpromising that thing might seem, into something intelligent, moving, and worthy—indeed, that art and brains could translate a pulp genre into the big leagues with one book. It has always seemed to me somehow appropriate that in the same decade in which Hammett demonstrated the high-art possibilities of the hardboiled detective genre with the publication of The Maltese Falcon (1930), his friend William Faulkner demonstrated, with the publication of Absalom, Absalom ! (1936)—the story of two amateur detectives puzzling over the facts of a very old murder, trying to solve the mystery of why a man killed his best friend and half-brother—that the gothic detective genre, founded by Poe in the Dupin stories, was capable of being translated into the very highest realms of literary art. In what follows I hope to show why it does not seem to me at all inappropriate to mention Hammett’s achievement in the same breath with Faulkner’s. II Most critics of The Maltese Falcon and most readers who have read it more than once have sensed the importance for the novel’s overall meaning of the Flitcraft story, which Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy at the start of chapter 7, ostensibly as a way of killing time, while they wait in Spade’s apartment for Joel Cairo to show up. The story of Flitcraft, a little over a thousand words in length, is usually treated by critics as a parable, as Spade’s way of obliquely telling Brigid, with whom he is becoming romantically involved, his view of life and the world, of telling her the sort of person he is. According to Spade, Flitcraft, a successful businessman in Tacoma, left his office one day to have lunch and never came back; he vanished“like a fist when you open your hand.”1 Flitcraft was happily married, had two young children, a thriving real estate business, owned his own home, had a new Packard,“and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living” (64). (One can imagine...